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Because starting now,

Because starting now, YouTube is giving users a choice over how they want to license their content. There’s still the standard YouTube license, which is fairly restrictive, and now there’s a new option: Creative Commons (with attribution). In short, you can now give other people permission to use your footage however they’d like, provided to include a link back to the source.

So, what does this mean for users? You’ll now be able to use YouTube’s video editor to splice your own video with content that has been uploaded by other users under Creative Commons, and they’ll be able to use your videos if you let them.

Part 3 – “SHOW”. November 11th, 2011 (11/11/11) It’s CC Festival at The Pigeonhole (Time to be advised) Presentations of selected works from Part 1 and 2. You can also find your own corner and present your work, barcamp style. We welcome all CC SG adopters to treat this like a CC Pasar Malam, promote your wares, and encourage others to use/ reuse. Questions? Email the CC-SG Community Manager Ivan Chew (ramblinglibrarian@gmail.com)

Teaching with Facebook is a way for me to engage my students, since many of them will be on the site before, after, and during any lecture. More than engagement, using Facebook allows me to build a bridge between my classroom curricula and what my students are doing outside the lecture hall. I must admit that student expertise with digital media often exceeds my own, and my attempts at using Facebook function as a common language that sets up my classroom as an experimental space allowing students to take risks, make connections, and participate with an alternative teaching style. As much as there are a number of other Facebook educators—there is even a Facebook groups for educators—I am certain that on my university campus I am the only instructor using this social network. My university administration has accused me of subverting our institutional course management system. They are correct. Facebook may be a commercial enterprise, but I argue that students can maintain a Facebook identity after they leave university. The work done in our lecture as represented in our Facebook group is something that lasts beyond a typical university course management system. In other words, access to the information, discussion, links, and learning is not cut off once the course is over.

Wired.com photographers have the enviable job of shooting the coolest stuff and most intriguing people in the technology world. Now we’re giving away many of those photos to you, the public, for free. Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) license and making them available in high-res format on a newly launched public Flickr stream.

The resource that really helped to clarify is this excellent 2 page poster-format document explains Copyright Fair Use in education.

In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment. I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA. These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But assessing students in this way, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.